


hellbound to me

by kuro49



Category: DCU, Deathstroke the Terminator (Comics), Under the Red Hood
Genre: M/M, Supernatural Elements, sladerobin week 2018
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-25
Updated: 2018-10-25
Packaged: 2019-08-07 12:58:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,852
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16408961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kuro49/pseuds/kuro49
Summary: Robin doesn’t survive Ethiopia but some thing does.Or the devil got to Jason Todd before Talia does and Slade Wilson makes a deal.





	hellbound to me

**Author's Note:**

> for sladerobin week's day 1 prompts: Power Struggle/Exchange and Deal with the Devil, this is a a bit of both and neither lmao

 

i. being robin gives me magic

 

 

His skin feels tight even if it is only scarring from the explosion. His head is heavy but that might just be the brain damage. His limbs ache like the inflammation is in the joints, broken bones haphazardly mended in the dark with nothing more than duct tape and some kind of mindless determination that the end has yet to come.

The dark that creeps underneath the skin has him crawling towards the light. 

Robin doesn’t survive Ethiopia but some thing does, and whatever Jason becomes, he comes back to Gotham a little bit different.

For one, he is dead.

For one more, he lives again.

 

It isn't fate, that they both agree on when Jason Todd comes across Slade Wilson in the bowels of lower Gotham's back alleys.

In itself, it is still a bit of a surprise, not that either one of them shows it.

The Bat holds too much control within Gotham City’s boundaries for the money to be worth the job most of the time for Deathstroke. There is a world outside of Gotham even if it doesn't seem like it when you are knee-deep inside her guts.

Jason is sucking in some deep long breaths, his lungs filling up with that godawful sour smell that permeates within her heart. He is fresh out of his grave, shaking off the decay from his flesh like it is dust, and as narrow as these streets are, it is nowhere as bad as it is inside of his own coffin. He is relishing the late Gotham night when.

“You’re the kid that came after Grayson.”

Jason jerks to a stop midway through a stumble.

Dressed down and coming from the opposite direction, Slade Wilson is walking down the same street. If it isn't for the hair or the build or the man's missing eye, Jason could have missed him entirely in his current state of mind.

“It’s Jason.” He tells him, wariness in every line of his body.

Jason can count the number of run-ins he's had with Deathstroke as Robin on one hand. But Slade recognizes him out of the red, green, and yellow, remembers him beneath the domino mask that leaves his eyes looking milky white, knows him as not-Grayson and he almost feels compelled to applaud him.

“Son,” Slade says as he looks, sees the dirt, the torn stitching in the suit he was buried in, and the matted blood beneath his nails and doesn't exactly put together the full picture but it comes close. “I’ll call you anything you want if you start explaining what you’re doing here.”

“I,” Jason starts but isn’t quite so sure himself. The silence is telling even if he doesn't owe this man a single thing, especially not the truth if it ever came down to it.

“'cause last I heard, kid. You were dead.”

If he blinks a little too long, the neon red countdown feels like the only thing he can still see beneath his eyelids. Jason looks at Slade and lets out what could be, in all technicality, be considered a laugh even if it doesn’t sound much like one.

"Funny thing about that." He says, eyes waning and mouth curling into a smile without a hint of mirth to it. "Last I knew, I was dead too."

 

He is not a stray to be taken home but he follows Deathstroke all the same. Because what else does he have to lose? Certainly not his way.

Slade takes him to a lonely diner on the corner of two equally decrepit streets and Jason thinks he's almost forgotten what hunger is until the moment the greasy smell of deep fryer oil and burger patties being grilled hits him not unlike he's been hollowed out. The pangs that he feels is consuming, like he's got nothing but a one-track mind as he sits across the table from Slade Wilson and eats enough food to fill a man twice his size.

They are in the booth tucked into the very back corner where the bright red synthetic leather stretches across the seats. It squeaks when he drags his palms across the plastic. 

They don't talk.

Or, at the very least, Jason doesn't say a thing when he catches Slade watching him in between sips of his hot coffee.

He shovels spoonfuls of beans smothered in tomato sauce into his mouth, bites into the oily breakfast sausages and chews that up while he drags an egg done sunny side up on top of his buttered toast. When the yolk drips, over his mouth and down his chin, he swipes a thumb across the mess and licks that clean too. He repeats this and clears every plate.

Jason has a pretty clear understand of what is happening. He is neither stupid nor blind, or delusional enough despite the extensive damage to think none of this comes without a price.

"You good, kid?"

He is not.

Not in the way it matters even if Jason has always pretended well enough.

He is sitting back, scrunching up a napkin in his hands as he wipes his mouth. The hunger inside of him sated for the time being. But he doesn't expect, let alone anticipate that his opinion factors into Slade's considerations at all. Jason imagines he deserves a little bit of a break after his death. He just isn't sure he wants it to be _this_ when Slade stands up at Jason's answering nod to his question, puts down enough bills to pay for the meal and leave a generous tip on top of that.

Because take away the moral ambiguity and Slade Wilson remains a mercenary for hire. A man to be bought.

Monetary values can be placed on a gesture and debts are always to be repaid with interest.  

This is not about to be any different.

 

He takes him to a motel next.

It is far below the kind of luxury Slade can afford but there is nobody who chooses Gotham as a travel destination. The man is here on a contract. There is practicality to hiding out in a city swarming with as many vigilantes as this one. A penthouse suite would've drawn them in like flies. Motels of this scale is a little bit different, above board for the most part, drawing that very fine line of falling right above the radar of some of the truly awful things in this city.

And the equipment spread out carefully inside of this motel room is indication of a very worthwhile job.

Jason takes the bed that isn’t covered by dismantled guns, and takes an extra pillow from the one that is. Pulling the sheets right up to his chin, dragging lines of dirt into the white, he points out.

“You want to keep me.”

“As cute as you think you are, kid.” Slade says, putting away the arsenal sprawled out across the other double bed to make room for himself. “I don't keep pets.”

Blinking slow and assessing, Jason’s mouth turns down.

“And if I _want_ to stay?”

Slade scoffs, tilts his head to the open bathroom door.

"I’d suggest a shower before anything else. But you're welcome to do what you want as long as I don’t have the Bat crawling all over me.”

If he looks up at night in Gotham, he knows just what to look for. It isn't stars in the sky. It is a streak of black and a red and green and yellow tail following after Bruce that is decidedly not _him_.

"He's got enough kids lined up around the block not to worry about a dead one coming back from the dead."

“His loss then.”

Slade is kind and Jason isn't taking it kindly.

He lays back, sinking into how soft it all is and burrowing himself deeper into the mattress out of spite even if he knows he reeks of dirt and decay and a laughable amount of drying blood. Slade doesn't exactly ignore him but he doesn't engage him any further, lets him sit there and stare as he clean every last part of every gun before putting it right back together.

The process is repetitive, boring, and hypnotizing in its rhythm because the last thing Jason is aware of is his eyes sliding shut and then—

 

Like an anchor in the sea, he is dead asleep.

He was fifteen, is sixteen if he is keeping count correctly, possibly even seventeen because he is probably not. There is a toss up whether time can be considered to pass by at all when he spends it inside of a grave, rotting instead of growing. But he can be turning thirty if he lives this long the second time around, and this is still not going to be the last time he finds the dark a terrifying place.

 

Pressing in against him from all sides, the dark is not new but the warmth that surrounds him is.

So is this low grade heat there in his lower abdomen, right below his navel and right above his groin. It is insistent, reminiscing of hunger but he _knows_ hunger and this isn't it. Not when it's only been an hour or so since a very full meal even as he feels the anticipation of something that drawls and crawls from beneath his skin outwards. This is an itch of a different kind if he’s ever felt it.

Jason wakes up, opens his eyes from the pitch black to find himself wet and warm, steam in the air with each breath he sucks into his lungs like it’s his last. He heaves, sitting up sharply, splashing water across the tiles only to find Slade watching him from where he is sitting on top of the toilet seat.

“You're getting the floors wet.” He says, and Jason feels like his brain is barely catching up to what is not quite happening here.

“...Did you put me into the bath?”

Slade raises an eyebrow at him, slow and assessing before he is standing up like he's figured Jason isn't about to drown himself now that he's awake. “Do you remember getting yourself into it?”

The motel Slade takes him back to is nondescript and the man behind the counter doesn’t look at them twice when they came in. The lack of concern despite the unsavory connotations the two of them make is the way of Gotham as Jason knows it. Except now Jason is sitting naked in the bathtub with Deathstroke the Terminator just an arm’s distance away.

Instead of fear, he only has the idea this is probably what it feels like to be cared for in the loosest sense of that word.

That is some level of messed up, and he knows this is probably not the question he should be asking at all but again, what more can he possibly lose? He is well into the negatives by now if he is wracking up points at all.

“Why are you doing this, Slade?”

The man pauses, not stepping through the threshold as he pulls the bathroom door open. The rush of cool air inside the confined space leaves Jason shivering. It is a long considering gaze that Slade keeps on him before he says. "Wouldn't you be curious to find a dead little bird wandering in the Bat's backyard too? I'm just doing what anyone else would do."

Except that isn't true. Not entirely at that.

Jason knows Slade could have him wishing he was dead again if he wanted. But he doesn't.

"Why do you care?"

“Kid, if you think this is what caring looks like, well then,” Slade stops himself deliberately and enough is said even if he never finishes his sentence.

When the door closed behind Deathstroke, Jason sinks right back into the heat of the water.

 

 

 

 

ii. going, going, gone stir-crazy in the dark

 

 

A death as violent as his reeks like something special.

It draws in a need for redemption like some kind of apology for the godawful hand he was dealt in life. Or perhaps, he is just damn _lucky_ like that because his desperation calls for the devil and the devil answers on some half-hearted whim. In the dark, Jason Peter Todd distinctly remembers a conversation that goes like: "You could be Father Christmas for all I care if that old man could give me the same thing you're offering."

The answering chuckle is low, is deep, and it makes him shake a little to the bone.

"My soul's not worth all that but you seem keen on it."

It is a fair warning as good as anything else, his word is what he's got left to bargain with. Jason finds himself thinking that he has no idea what he is agreeing to but maybe that is the whole point when he accepts.

There is hardly enough blood left to seal the deal but he makes it count.

The answering chuckle rumbles again and this time, it is rattling through Jason's teeth to fill the cavern of his mouth like something slick.

 

It is never a good idea to cheat death.

Good thing, he still has half his mind to know that much. 

 

He wants him.

Not in the way Jason is used to but it is not an entirely foreign feeling either when Slade makes it clear. It is not a split second decision but if he is going to be used so thoroughly, Jason intends to get something out of it too.

“After this job of yours, I want out.” Jason says like he is calling any of the shots here.

“Out of?” Slade isn't saying no but he isn't exactly saying yes either and Jason has no idea what Slade has planned for him.

“Gotham.”

“And go where exactly?”

Slade Wilson wants him as leverage because a Robin is worth good money even when dead. Jason is not about to argue that one because he thinks there is some kind of plan to the choices he makes no matter how bad. There is some clarity to all that missing time in between.

“Away,” Jason answers with some finality to his wish. “That’s good enough for now.”

 

The first time it happens, Jason opens his eyes to Slade Wilson looming over him, his back flat against the floor and he thinks he must have hit his head on something when he went down because his head is aching something _bad_.

Naturally, he thrashes.

"Stay still." Slade tells him, firm in those two simple words. He doesn't show it but he is using a good amount of his strength to keep the kid down and if that isn't telling, Slade isn't sure what is.

"I _can't_." Jason bites out because his heart is beating double time and he thinks his vision might be tunneling if the slow crawl of black from the corners is any indication at all.

"What was that?"

Slade’s question is short of a demand, and Jason has never once reacted well to that.

"What was _what_?"

Jason tries again, moving against the tight, tight, tightening grip Slade has on both of his wrists keeping him still. Even as Robin, Jason has fought Slade before, the strength is not new but to know it this intimately and so close, Jason feels like he could vibrate out of his skin because Slade's grip on him burns like a brand. He jostles it again, twisting into it.

"Let me be the one asking questions here.”

Slade looks unimpressed but Jason does too.

Patience is not a virtue he ever mastered and it takes a little bit. But when he simply goes lax, sinks right back into the floor because he is fucking exhausted even though he is pretty sure he's been sleeping during the night and most of the day too when Slade went out on recon for his contract without a single word. It is only then that Slade lets him go, pulls back to sit on his hunches so he is kneeling instead of looming over him.

The short distance between them seems to clear his head.

“...I think I was dreaming.”

Admitting it out loud like this seems to vindicate something even if Jason is not entirely sure what, or at least that is what he thinks all those missing hours of his day indicate.

“And, what'd you dream of?”

“The dark.” He answers, blinking up at the ceiling before glancing around because strangely, he is not seeing the ceiling fan at the right angle.

“Anything else?” Slade asks, and there is that slow crawl of patience that Jason isn't used to.

He is nowhere near his own double bed. He is lying on the floor between the wall and Slade's own bed. His answer this time comes but it is uneasy as he tries to understand what this is building up to mean. “I don't think so."

When Slade stands up, Jason stays on the ground for a little bit longer, his skin feeling overheated and his heart not showing a single sign of slowing down.

“What'd I do?” He calls out at Slade’s retreating back, feeling like he is missing something important here.

Slade doesn't answer at first, and Jason almost doesn't anticipate one but it comes, slow and even.

“I'm not sure yet.”

It sounds like a promise that he'll figure it out. Surprisingly, Jason finds himself being okay with that.

 

There is a finite time here no matter how long the days stretch into longer nights. Slade doesn't ask him to stay but he has no inclination to leave these four walls either.

The city feels different in its indifference.

In all honesty, he doesn't know what he is looking to feel here. Out of every emotion, self pity is hitting hard and it feels like he is rotting inside out with it.

He is halfway through a midday snack that consists of a full takeout container of Pad Thai while he is peering over Slade's shoulder as the man makes last minute adjustments to the blueprints laid out on his bed. It isn't like Deathstroke the Terminator to make last minute changes but it seems like there's been a rotation to the guards’ duty roster that is forcing Slade’s hand. There is some consideration for how he is standing, close but not enough to touch and right in the field of Slade’s peripheral vision instead of anywhere else. Jason bites down on his plastic fork streaked in orange grease, scans the plotted route, and makes a soft noise when Slade puts a marking down on the paper.

"This is hardly my first contract in Gotham." Slade points out, glancing at the kid from the corner of his eye and find the empty box of Thai takeout that he got for himself.

"I know _that_ , but you don't know him like I do."

Jason draws a line with his fingertip, traces a path through this city he knows in his blood.

"Too many vigilantes work in and out of Gotham, patrol areas overlap and their routes are too unpredictable to plot correctly." He tells him with a deep set frown as he studies the map. "But it doesn't really matter, you only need to avoid Batman, and he's always predictable when it counts.”

Slade laughs sharply.

"You're breaking your old man's heart, kid."

 

Later, when Slade finds Jason inside his files, looking far guiltier now than he did when he readily gives up bits and broken pieces of intel unprompted, Slade points out the obvious because he is hardly the kind of man to extend any kind of olive branch.

“You want to feel bad.” Jason shoves Slade’s supposedly secured laptop away from him, and Slade takes that as permission to continue even when he’s never waited on anyone’s say so before. This is not him about to start either even if it feels dangerously close to that. “But you don’t and that just makes it worse for you.”

Slade doesn’t ask, he doesn’t even pry.

Slade doesn’t leave Jason with any excuse to make any of this feel better.

If asked, betrayal is what Jason would call this when he readily gives up the kind of information he does. It is not much but it isn't nothing either. The lack of any sense of guilt gnaws inside of him, has Jason wondering if something is really wrong with him on top of everything else.

“It’s not like there’s an exorbitant amount of things I could be doing instead.”

Jason is thirty pages into an old retired general’s classified files, more than half of it redacted and even more that Jason’s relatively sure shouldn’t even exist in the first place.

“Make yourself useful then.” Slade pushes the laptop back in front of Jason, leaves him right where he left off and gives them both a break to say. “Tell me how you would do it.”

 And Jason does.

 

The second time it happens, he is blinking his eyes open and the motion feels slow, like he is moving through molasses.

He finds Slade sitting up at the head of the bed with his eye trained on him. There are plenty of things wrong here but he can't quite place a finger on anything just yet.

“You look concerned.” Jason points out and the distance leaves him aching somewhere deep inside of his head.

“You would too if you could see yourself, kid.”

Slade gets out of bed and drags Jason with him, hand wrapping around his wrist to bring him into the connected bathroom just a few short steps away. In his prolonged life, Slade Wilson has been to some very interesting places and seen some very interesting things. But this is the first time he’s ever laid an eye on _this:_  Horns in his hair and a whip-cord tail, the kid looks like he could be the devil but that could just be a trick of the light.

Slade flicks on the light switch and floods the bathroom in fluorescent to show them both it really isn’t.

“You birdies are something special.”

Slade looks almost impressed, and it is that expression on Deathstroke’s face that really cements the situation for Jason.

In his short sad life, Jason has been many things. From a no good little street rat scraping by to being caught red-handed jacking the wheels off of the Batmobile to playing enforcer in the colours of traffic lights to dead in Ethiopia, he has never once been this.

The horns are organic but unfeeling like keratin, grooves for texture and it looks like an extension of himself even when he cannot feel it. Jason stands there with a quiet sort of panic unfolding inside of him while his tail sways almost languidly.

And he is near silent when he offers this instead. “You have no idea what happened to me.”

“I don’t doubt that.”

“ _I_ have no idea what happened to me.” Jason says, again like that changes anything at all.

His voice is steady but he thinks he might be shaking, standing there in a pair of thin sweatpants that's been pushed down low over his hips to accommodate the new appendage, autopsy scar running down his torso. It all looks like a bad nightmare, and Jason has no intention to be cut wide open for a second time.

“Stop lying to yourself, kid.”

There is no intonation in Slade's voice, there is no accusation and Jason doesn't understand what that is supposed to mean.

Slade has one hand in his hair, right at the base of a horn to turn Jason's head from the mirror to face Slade directly. Jason tears out a thin little whine from his throat, and he is pitiful if he says so himself.

“You know the truth,” Slade says with certainty, his eye not looking away. “Maybe not in exact details but you know what happened.”

 

Laid out in the barest terms, there is no question about it.

This is what he agreed to. This is him paying death back by the ten folds where the interest is steep when you are making a deal in blood you barely have.

 

 

 

 

iii. you're spellbound and i'm hellbound to you

 

 

The devil demands sacrifice.

Jason doesn't think he is much of one. He is no blushing virgin or innocent in any shape or form. Seen way too many ugly things in this life and done just as much. But the devil takes him, like he still falls within some kind of category of an acceptable return policy.

"I don't know what a prayer is but,” Jason corrects himself. “Something answered regardless. When I died, I made a deal to come back."

He doesn’t know what he anticipates from a man like Slade Wilson but it probably isn’t this.

“Was it worth it, Jason?”

Perhaps Willis Todd was right after all.

He might just be the damned prince of Gotham. And what damnation it is when there is no hesitation to his answer.

“Every penny of my goddamn soul.”

Slade smiles, and _finally_.

“That’s what I want to hear.”

 

The third time he wakes up in Slade's bed, the man doesn't put him on the ground even when the horns come out.

It is a bit of a learning curve, and Jason takes notes because it isn't exactly clockwork but they find a pattern when this is happening with increasing frequency if he doesn't address it. The sheets are not the softest thing but it isn’t gravel rough on his knees either.

"So, how do you want this, little bird?"

Jason really isn't quite so little anymore, but in comparison to Deathstroke, he thinks he'll always have room to grow.

"I don't think I'm particularly picky." Jason tells him, reaching for him.

He refers to what resides within him as himself, but neither one of them points that out.

“How about you tell me what you want?”

“I'm not sure I have the words for it.”

The low grade heat becomes a burning that makes him itch beneath the skin and Jason is already moving, shedding that thin pair of sleep pants as he gets close.

What he has no words for, his body knows exactly what to ask for.

“I'm sure we can figure something out.” Slade says, letting Jason reach out for him and accommodate him in between his thighs.

Jason sighs into the contact, Slade’s hands in his.

Slade doesn't pull or guide, gives him enough room for Jason to move on his own and however he likes. And he likes it when he can devour the taste of Slade Wilson atop his parted lips, sinking his teeth down onto Slade’s tongue to draw a flood of copper inside of his mouth.

He drags the rough slide of Slade’s palms against the curve of his jaw, let’s the weight of it rest against his neck, the man’s thumb just against the hollow of his throat. When he leans forward, Slade stays in place, allows that dizzying pressure to build and build until there are black spots in his vision and then.

Jason closes his eyes into it.

 

What exists within him is himself and what he wants is fulfillment of some very basic instincts magnified with need.

He doesn’t whine into it, not yet anyways. Not until Slade runs a hand along his sides and down to dip of his spine to dig his fingers into the base of that tail he’s got. And then, Jason _melts_.

With his nails running down Slade’s chest, drawing lines deep enough to bleed beads of red, his tail winds itself around Slade's wrist in a vice grip until it leaves a ring of matching red.

Jason is breathing hard enough to make sure each rise and fall of his chest comes out on a shuddering breath that wracks him to his core when Slade pushes a finger in on an exhale. Has Jason choking off a very sweet sound against that first intrusion, has him trying to accommodate the stretch with every rub of the rough pads of Slade's fingertips against his slick walls when he adds another and then one more to the mix.

The repetition to Slade's ministrations and the patience to it has Jason fluttering his eyes shut with how good it feels at this single point of contact, enough to have him rocking his hips down and right into the pace Slade sets while he works his fingers sloppily in and out of him.

It is lust, it is hunger, it is a whole lot of greed for _more_.

Jason has given it a taste of what Slade can provide. And it would be downright foolish to think it could settle for anything less.

“Feels good?” Slade asks with a chuckle, a low rumbling sound that has Jason wanting to reach past skin and muscles to run his fingertips through his vocal cords just to have that noise running through his bones.

When Jason blinks his eyes open, he smiles just as slow into another kiss, lets Slade fuck his mouth wide open and so thoroughly before he pulls back a breath's distance away to answer. “It’ll do.”

Jason tips backwards, dragging Slade with him.

Hair fanned out against the sheets, white streak against the dark of his curls, Jason draws Slade down to him. The constant heat just beneath his skin is a flickering candle in the dark, far from reaching that boiling point. And Jason has every intention of keeping it here. Arching his spine, he rubs the length of his body up against Slade’s, smears the blood from the healing scratches over his own in a mess of red.

“Kid," Slade says, a chuckle in its own right and he looks indulgent for how kind he plays this, "you’ve got some bad taste.”

Jason laughs enough to have his shoulders shaking, his voice feeling rubbed raw while he lets out on a rasp.

“Lucky _me_ ,” he drags his tongue across his lips, looking obscene in its entirety. “Good thing you’re worst.”

Slade doesn't argue with that, and when Jason closes his eyes once more, the dark doesn't hit him nearly as hard when they figure a few things out to do with who Jason is and what he's become underneath the fluorescent lights of the motel room. They also leave some things for the next time.

 

However brief, Jason was a Titan too.

He knows where this is going before Slade ever had to ask. 

 

(He was a son too.)

 

Yet, this is still a conversation to have.

“Joey.” With his hair swept back by sweat, Jason starts from where he is lying stretched out and naked across Slade’s bed instead of his own. Subdued and almost languid, feeling warm and sedated down to the marrow of his bones. He doesn't need half his head to be intact to know how he looks and how entirely inappropriate this exchange probably is. “You want your son back.”

“Yes." Slade doesn’t mince words when he replies, already suited up for what he has planned to do in this city, unbothered by the kid or the mess reeking the stench of sex on him even when everything has already deviated from the initial plan on a single whim to bring him along.

Jason hesitates because here is the catch. “Enough to make a deal with me?”

With his helmet still in his hands, Slade’s face is bare.

“Like I said, yes.”

The very literal physical manifestation of the actual devil might be gone but Jason can feel that insistent itch beneath his skin to take what Slade is offering without those words. Because every action comes with consequences and he knows each one that comes after will be paid in blood.

But even the devil is not above gaining a favour from Deathstroke.

“There’s a difference between being back and being alive.”

After all, Jason is living proof, pun and all.

“I’ll take what I can get.”

It really isn’t any kind of consolation but Slade isn’t looking for that. And Jason has never once thought to offer.

“You don’t think you might be making a mistake?”

“What's one more in a list of many?”

Slade's question doesn't need an answer and he confirms that for Jason when he slips his helmet on.

This is probably the signal for the end of a conversation neither one of them will admit to having. Jason doesn't think it is entirely guilt when he sits up and the motions are trained into every fiber of his muscles when his fingers sign: _Sorry_. The dead doesn’t get a say. It’s the will of the living, Jason is once again reminded of this.

Closure was never something he got in his last life, so what is one more lifetime without it? Jericho was still a friend.

 

That night, Slade kills the man he came to kill.

The same night Slade takes him out of Gotham.

 

The sky lights up with the bat signal. In itself, that is nothing special.

“Last chance, kid.” Slade tells him and gets an eye roll for his efforts.

“Already took my last one when I went with you the first time.” Jason says, the week he's been with Deathstroke feeling like a lifetime ago. It doesn’t take any convincing at all is what he keeps saying. The world is a very big place, and it’s easy to forget that when all he’s ever known is this city alone. “Let me make it easier for us both, I _want_ to be here.”

Slade doesn’t point out his vocabulary is mostly made up of needs and wants, food and sleep and sex in that specific rotation. It is a very primal way of living if he says anything at all. The lack of Batman’s morality is nice though.

“Correction, kid. You just don’t want to be here.”

He is not wrong, but he isn't entirely correct either.

They are standing at the top of one of the high rise that rivals Wayne Tower's height, the noise of the chopper coming closer keeps Jason from getting the last word in. He knows Slade timed that just right. But it is the night air hitting him, far harder than any of Slade’s snide comments could and it’s a well-aimed blow that leaves him ragged with bruises. Gotham doesn’t take well to saying good-bye.

Good thing Jason’s superpower is practically taking a punch at this point.

Maybe there is a someday here for him, but for now, he has Jump City bay in mind. One thing at a time, he’s got time for his plans to come to fruition. When they leave, Jason doesn’t turn back. All debts are paid in full, and Jason intends to collect from the Bat of Gotham when the time comes.

Before that, he’s got the devil to please for all the efforts they went through to drag him back here from hell.

 

 


End file.
